Homily – 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

Fr Christopher Dillon OSB

Well, that is putting it to you, to all of us; and from every angle! Whether it is Isaiah, from eight hundred years before Christ, to Saints Paul and Matthew, only a few years after Christ, the message is the same; it is up to us to get it done, whatever is to be done. The title of Fr Columba’s new book, Becoming Divine, is the name of the game. The whole Christian project has been summed up as God becoming human in Jesus Christ, so that we humans, on being baptised into Christ, may become divine, co-heirs with Christ, as the text of the
Mass puts it. This, you might say, is the Christian perspective on what this whole business of human living is about, the very meaning of human life. And the programme is not complicated; it is very practical stuff, sharing our bread with the hungry, sheltering the homeless poor, clothing the naked.

We’ve all got much more than we need; and the St Vincent de Paul shop and the Oxfam shop are very happy to receive whatever we bring them. But there is also the personal and inter-personal stuff; we must do away with the clenched fist, the unkind word, the put-down, the mean trick, dishonesty and cheating. Because we are baptised into Christ, we are Christ, “members of his body”, as we say, and so we must behave as Christ; and, as such, we are to set the standard for the rest of the world; and that can get complicated, very complicated.
But, if we start with the simple things, the obvious things, we will grow into the larger, more difficult, tasks. St Benedict writes of the monastery as a school of the Lord’s service; and there is a very real way in which the boys’ school here shares in that characteristic; and in that regard, the staff here and the monastic community succeed in our work if the young people in our care learn to be Christ-like, just as we fail, if the boys do not learn.

But in all this, we are not on our own; for we have received the Holy Spirit of God, both in Baptism and in Confirmation, to guide us in our thinking and our doing. That is what the intimacy of Isaiah’s words mean, when he writes, “Cry, and the Lord will answer; call and he will say, “I am here.’” These are words which invite us to be constant in prayer; that is, ever to be aware of the Divine Presence and ever ready to respond to it.

We have heard all this before, so many times; and what difference has it
made? While it may seem that nothing we do is particularly significant, it is also true that we really do not know how our behaviour, good or bad, affects others. All we can be sure of is that it matters what we say and do and how we say and do it. It is our decision whether we make a difference for the worse or for the better; and decision time is every moment of every day.

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